


Pick Up Your Feet

by Barkour



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Action, M/M, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-25
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 13:18:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the climactic battle with the Reach, Bart Allen--with a little help--goes looking for Jaime Reyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pick Up Your Feet

**Author's Note:**

> To future readers: this was written with three episodes left to air in the second season, so forgive the inevitable splits from canon.

Fire consumed the sky; it ate up the horizon. Bart cast his hand before his eyes and turned away, for it was bright, so very bright. He was thrown by the ferocity of it. Ozone stung his mouth. The earth lurched beneath him and he staggered with it. He thought for a moment that the atmosphere had caught on fire; then he looked.

A ship had come to ground in the distance, far enough away it looked small when he knew it to be huge: a Reach vessel, its many-jointed legs shattered. It spewed flame and smoke out the jagged hole in its gut. A powerful explosion rent the seam at its side. Light still flickered in the sky, some energy shockwave that ran like lightning through the clouds.

Wonder Girl smashed into the rock beside Bart, knocking him back. She rose out of her crouch, hand up over her eyes as she squinted into the flaring heat. Light glanced off her bracers. She had blood smeared across her face; it ran down from a gash that coursed beneath her hair.

“Was that one of us?”

In the skyline over Metropolis, a second Reach vessel tilted. The head ruptured; it, too, began to vomit fire as it fell slowly toward the bay.

Bart’s heart ran in his chest.

“It’s Jaime,” he said. “It’s Jaime, it has to be. He’s in there. He’s doing this.”

One of the Reach’s lithe drone fighters screamed through the air at them. The soil and rock tore up in three lines advancing swiftly towards them. Another drone bore down on them from the left. Bart stuck his hands at Wonder Girl; she grabbed his wrists, braced, and, spinning him roughly once, tossed him high and unerringly at the first fighter.

Oh, wait, he thought as the cicada nose of the fighter filled his vision. I’ve never actually—

He was vibrating -- and thinking, a little desperately, oh, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy, I really really really hope this doesn’t hurt – when he hit the fighter. The metal was nothing before him. He passed through it as easily as if it were water, as easily as if he’d had a running start. As he passed through it, he grabbed at wires, gears, anything he could, slowing, as he did so, the vibration of his hands enough that they tore and spat sparks. And then he was out again and falling back to Earth.

Wonder Girl plucked him out of the air. The drone burst as it drove into the soil. The smoking wreckage of the second, pounded straight into the rock by Wonder Girl, exploded.

“Holy shit!” said Wonder Girl. She was still cradling Bart. “Since when could you do that?”

“I think like two seconds ago,” said Bart. “Yeah, since then. We need to get up there—” He pointed over her shoulder at Metropolis. “—right now.”

“You want to take on the big ships?” Wonder Girl turned back to look. “Just us? By ourselves?”

“Not by ourselves. Jaime’s up there, too,” he said. “Who else could be taking them out from inside like that?”

“How do you know that’s Jaime?” Wonder Girl demanded. But she slung Bart over her shoulder and began running. “How do you know it’s not just his suit going, I don’t know, haywire?”

She kicked off the ground, her toe punching a crater into the rock. The wind snarled at them. They broke through the clinging layer of smoke and on towards Metropolis.

“I know!” Bart shouted. “I know it’s him! It has to be! They did something to the scarab to get it on mode, but Jaime’s still in there. He’s alive so that means—”

“And what if he’s not!”

They were between the first scattered skyscrapers. Wonder Girl tossed up her free arm, deflecting a blast from an incoming drone; then she caught the nose in her palm and squeezed. The explosion whipped past them.

“Jaime can’t be the Blue Beetle from my future.” He struggled to explain it. “He just—he can’t be. He’s in there—I’ve seen him—and if he’s in there then he has to be fighting. He said they had to kill him to reset the scarab, but they didn’t kill him.”

“You better be right,” Wonder Girl yelled, “because we’re here!”

He looked back over her shoulder. The torn hull of the second Reach vessel blocked out the sky; then Wonder Girl turned to block him with her body as they ripped through the devastated metal to the other side. Two walls broke before them. She shoved her feet down, slowing, and dropped Bart. He stumbled forward, caught his fall on his fingertips, and pushed back up to his feet.

“So what do we do now?”

“I didn’t think that far ahead,” said Impulse. “Kind of my program.”

“Great,” said Wonder Girl. “I don’t have a plan either. This would be a lot easier if Batgirl was here…”

“Well,” said Bart, “I’ll go look for Blue, and you can go beat somebody up?”

“No way,” Wonder Girl shot back, “well—unless they get in the way. But I’m looking for him, too.”

 Bart smiled. “Really? You’re sure you want to look for him? When he’s possibly still totally on mode and I might very well be wrong about this whole thing given my track record with this whole rewrite the time stream business so far?”

Wonder Girl looked at him. The blood caked along her face had dried in the wind; now it flaked. She rolled her lips in. The skin beneath her eyes was bruised. They all had tired eyes these days.

“Jaime’s my friend, too,” she said. “Keep your comm on.”

Bart ran.

The vessel was sinking, and it was vast, like the one that had held them those long weeks ago. He had found Jaime at last, imprisoned in a pod and screaming, and when Bart had ripped Jaime out of it—anger driving Bart, a true anger that had made his stomach hurt to see Jaime crying out like that—he had held Jaime. He had felt Jaime breathing. Slapped Jaime’s cheek lightly but quickly until Jaime woke and said, “Bart—?”

It wouldn’t be like that again. He knew that. As he barreled through the chambers, along the halls, down floors, he knew this: he had never known how Blue Beetle had turned. He had never known why. He couldn’t know now that this was not part of it. He knew that, but—

Another floor. No Jaime. Drones buzzed futilely around their chambers and out among the halls. He evaded them easily; they were laughably slow. A scientist, one of the Reach, staggered out into the hallway, coughing. Smoke poured out the shaft behind them.

Bart took a chance and shot down it. The smoke thickened. He emerged a level below, in a corridor that stank of something sharp and clean. A memory, flicking quickly through: in the desert outside El Paso, Jaime showed off the plasma cannon. He’d taken aim at a large rock formation, pulled, and the air split with a smell like a knife.

“How’s that?” Jaime had said. He’d blown imaginary smoke from the end of his arm and smiled over at Bart.

Now Bart thought, perfect, you’re perfect, you are so way totally perfect, and thinking this still, he raced after the smoke and the ionized scent of a discharging plasma cannon.

Another floor. Two chambers in hurried succession. The third spat fire into the hallway as he neared it, and he ducked in, dodging the licking flames.

Blue Beetle was there. Joy leapt fiercely in Bart’s breast. But Blue Beetle was not alone. He was crouched at the far wall, both arms held out in straight lines, cannons charging.

“Enough, little brother,” said Black Beetle. He swarmed out of the cloud of ash as though it meant nothing. Perhaps to him it did not. “You are a hindrance.”

Blue Beetle fired.

Bart slapped the comm at his ear. “I’ve found him, I found Jaime, but Black Beetle’s down here, too—”

“Great,” said Wonder Girl, “I need a rematch. I’m tracking your position right now so just stay right there. He’s tough and I don’t think you’re really in his lea—”

Black Beetle caught Blue Beetle’s left arm and threw him high against the wall, pinning him there.

“—gue—”

Bart smashed into Black Beetle’s side. It didn’t do much—he hadn’t had enough of velocity to knock Black Beetle more than an inch to the side and oh, boy, the guy was h-u-g-e—but in the tenth of a second that Black Beetle very nearly staggered, Blue Beetle slammed his charged fist into Black Beetle’s neck and fired again. Already off-balance, thrown off by the unyielding force of Black Beetle’s bulk, Bart tumbled back.

“Have you brought friends, little brother?” asked Black Beetle. He did not deign to look for Bart. “It does not matter. They cannot help you.”

“Designation not compatible,” said Blue Beetle. He said it coldly—for a moment Bart heard pick up your feet, slave—and then he shot again. As he did so, he snarled, “I have no brother. I am an _only child_.”

Black Beetle shrugged off the second shot. The third glanced off his shielding arm.

“You are off mode,” said Black Beetle. He smiled. The effort distorted his face. “If you will not allow yourself to be rebooted then I will dismantle you. Limb by limb.”

Bart took in the breadth of the chamber. It was a moderately-sized oval room lined with dimmed pods; along the back length of the chamber the pods were smashed and smoking. A body laid crumpled in the rubble – a man with pale green skin in the high-collared suit of the Reach. Some little thing caught in Bart, a thought: Would Jaime have wanted someone to die?

“We’re heroes, hermano,” Jaime had said once. “We shouldn’t do that surrender or die thing.”

I should care, Bart thought. He raced over to the body in the rubble, thinking: _I should care. I should care._ The man was dead. His chest had been crushed. His throat had burst. A gooey, blue ichor oozed out of the rip in his neck. And Bart, looking down into the face of the Reach, did not care, even as guilt shivered vaguely through him, even as he thought: Jaime would care.

“I do not require a system reboot.”

Bart looked back to them, to Blue Beetle diminutive before the vastness of Black Beetle. Blue Beetle was curled, his back bent as though his own weight exhausted him.

“I exist,” said Blue Beetle defiantly. Not Jaime, but the scarab. It existed in there. Jaime must, too.

“Not for long,” said Black Beetle. He raised his arm. Blue Beetle’s face turned up. He began to lift his own arm in response.

There wasn’t much room to run. Bart took the chamber in laps, building speed. He had a thought, half-formed – to use the wind funnel to separate them or to at least complicate the field so that the bulkier Black Beetle would be if not at a disadvantage then no longer at an advantage against the aerial Blue Beetle – if he could ramp up enough speed in such close quarters— They were frozen, the Beetles Black and Blue, _ha-ha-ha_ , only there wasn’t anything funny about it, not if he couldn’t—

He saw it in slow motion, each agonizing second elongated: Blue Beetle’s wings extended. Rocked by the growing wind, Black Beetle staggered. The same current offered Blue Beetle the opportunity needed to gain distance. He jumped into the wind. His wings caught in it. No control—but that was all right. Bart crossed the gap and, riding his momentum up the wall, he leapt for Blue Beetle and caught him in his arms.

“Don’t shoot!” Bart shouted. “It’s me—Impulse—I’m here to help you! Both of you!”

And then the roof caved in. Not all of it fell in—only most of it—and through that ragged hole, parting the smoke as she came through it, Wonder Girl descended like a ray of sun through a dark cloud.

Black Beetle sneered. He shook off the rubble, the dust. “Distractions. Do you think this fresh meat means anything—”

Then Wonder Girl—her shoulder bunching, her leg rising behind her—punched him square in the face; the force of the blow reverberated through Bart. Black Beetle crashed through the wall, dragging nearly the whole of it down with him.

“Honey, I’m home!” she crowed. She glanced briefly aside, her fists still at the ready. “Impulse—get Blue—”

“I got him!” Bart said, clutching Blue Beetle tightly. “You go get Big and Ugly!”

Wonder Girl popped her knuckles: first the left hand, then the right hand; and when she had done this she shook her hands out and said, “With pleasure.” She shot through the crumbling wall after Black Beetle. Her battle cry was lost in the sound of crunching metal. Black Beetle roared.

Blue Beetle surged in Bart’s arms as if to follow after Wonder Girl. A hand closed on Bart’s shoulder and closed hard. The fingers bit into the muscle; he felt it echo in his bones. Just a little more pressure and the joint would snap. So Bart wrapped his arm more tightly around Blue Beetle’s waist and ran them both into the mess of broken pods at the back of the room. Glass showered. The blow jolted through Bart; his teeth bit into his tongue. He tasted blood and swallowed.

“Release me!” said Blue Beetle. Teeth flashed in that patterned face. Jaime’s teeth, under all that. The whine of the cannon started up. Bart saw his own head, blown off, like in a cartoon only with a lot more blood on the camera.

“Okay, wait, before you try to shoot my face off, you have to listen to me,” Bart said quickly, grabbing onto the cannon Blue Beetle made to lift. “I just saved your beetley butt—that bug was going to crush you if I hadn’t stepped in to stop him. Why do you think Wonder Girl’s fighting him right now?”

“I do not understand the meat,” said Blue Beetle. “She exterminates a threat. Her motives are not mine to comprehend.”

But his arm was still beneath Bart’s hand. He could have thrown Bart off. He did not. Jaime, thought Bart.

“How do you know?” Wonder Girl had said.

“She’s doing it for you,” Bart said. “She’s doing it for Jaime—he’s her friend, she cares about him, I care about him, why do you think we came here looking for you?”

Blue Beetle’s face tightened.

“I am not Jaime Reyes.”

“No,” said Bart. He loosened his hold on the cannon. His fingers remained on the ridges; energy hummed through his hand. “You’re not. But he’s in there, isn’t he? He crashed the mode—he got you off-line. So he has to be in there. He’s in there with you. He _is_.”

Blue Beetle lowered his arm. In the wreckage of the pod, embraced by twisted metal and the smoke that lingered, he was both the nightmare Bart remembered and nothing like that at all. He was a shadow. He was a shell.

“Jaime Reyes cannot fight,” said Blue Beetle. “He is weak. To survive I must have control.”

Bart threw his arms out. “You survived because of him!”

Blue Beetle stared down at him. The difference in their height was not so great. This Blue Beetle was small; this Blue Beetle was slim. This Blue Beetle was not controlled by the Reach.

An explosion rocked the ship. They were sinking faster now. Out there, somewhere, Wonder Girl screamed in rage.

“This is irrelevant,” said Blue Beetle.

Bart pushed him back into the pod. “No,” he said, “it’s not—this is so relevant, this is totally relevant. You were in there the whole time—you know why I came back in time, what I’m trying to stop.”

“The extinction of the human race is irrelevant.”

“Does Jaime think that?” Bart demanded, pushing again. “Did you ask him? Did he get you off mode just to let you—let you do nothing?”

The eyes in that smooth face glowed like dying stars.

“What do you want of Jaime Reyes?” asked the scarab.

His heart beat to deafen. His breath had thinned; he swallowed air more than he breathed it. The scarab had lowered its cannon and still Bart felt energy running through his hand. He could not be still.

What had he come back to save? He had come back to save everything. Green pastures. Golden fields. Snow on mountaintops and trees below. Red deserts pocked with water. His family, the ones who lived now, the ones who’d live later. Mount Justice. The sprawling oceans, blue now. The human race, the Earth. Jaime.

His hands were on Blue Beetle’s shoulders. Then they were on Blue Beetle’s face. The mask was so perfectly smooth under his hands. No cheekbones, no nose, no small scar at the corner of Jaime’s jaw. Only the mask.

Bart said, “I want to know he’s alive.”

Blue Beetle knocked his hands away. “This form cannot be maintained if the host body is deceased.”

“But is he _in_ there!”

Bart shouted it. His throat ached with the force. He had to believe – he had to believe – but he saw only the scarab before him. Only that face, that terrible face, the black laid over the blue, the eyes like death.

The lean angle of the jaw, that was Jaime. The suggestion of lip beneath the flattening mask, that was Jaime, too.

The comm fizzed in Bart’s ear. He winced.

“I’ve got him pinned down,” Wonder Girl shouted, “but I could use some extra firepower if Blue’s up to it—watch it! This is the _Wonder Woman_ insignia! She gave me this shirt in _person_!”

An explosion rocked the ship. The floor bucked. Wonder Girl cut off. Bart fell against Blue Beetle, riding it out in the little shelter of the pod with Beetle a wall before him. He’d a sensory memory, then, thought without words, of—not a pod, but a stasis cell, held frozen without pain or thought, as if dead. That had been the scarab’s doing, after they’d won the Warworld. Now Bart leaned against Blue Beetle.

No—not an explosion. They’d hit the water.

“Wonder Girl needs help with Black Beetle, and I’m pretty sure we’re sinking in the Atlantic Ocean and I really don’t think that’s good for any of us.”

Bart rushed it out. He made to step back – tried to usher in his mind how to word it to the scarab, that to help them was in its own interests – then a hand caught him by the shoulder, and the fingertips shivered along the swell of his arm.

“Bart,” said Blue Beetle.

He looked up. He looked up into the face of Blue Beetle. The lighting had gone out. Only emergency power remained in the drowning vessel. Blue Beetle’s eyes shone in the dark. The hand at Bart’s shoulder slipped down his arm. The grip was loose. It loosened.

“Bart,” said Blue Beetle again. The voice was faint, but it did not waver. And in the dark, that face changed. The armor withdrew. Flesh emerged. “Bart, it’s me—”

How did he know? How could he know? In the Warworld he had thought Blue Beetle his friend, his ally. Then Jaime had smashed the crystal key against the back of Bart’s head and he had fallen into darkness; he had woken, gasping, on the floor of a Reach vessel, his head aching.

“It’s me,” Jaime had said on the bioship. That had been so long ago. “It’s me.”

The mask fell away. Jaime’s face swam up out of the armor. That was his jaw. That was his nose. Those were his eyes, dark brown and bloodshot in the whites. The scar at his jaw was pale. When had Jaime last slept? When had the Reach last allowed him to sleep? Had he seen it all? Had he watched, unable to sleep, unable to look away? The voice of fear said, What if this is a trick?

“It’s me,” said Jaime, reaching for Bart.

How could Bart know? He knew.

He surged forward again. His fingers skated over Jaime’s cheeks; they caught in his hair, his black hair, his unwashed hair that had started growing out. Jaime’s lips were dry. Peeling, too. They were rough against Bart’s mouth. Jaime drew in a sharp breath. His hand fluttered up Bart’s arm to cup his shoulder again.

“I know,” said Bart, kissing Jaime again, “I know—” Again. “It’s you, it’s you, ‘course it’s you—” Each, another flickering touch. Bart scattered kisses like raindrops on Jaime’s dry, worn face. Bart traced the ridge of each cheekbone with a finger. He cradled Jaime’s jaw, that lean length of bone beneath muscle and skin.

Jaime leaned into Bart’s arms. He gave in. His spine curled; his shoulders drooped; his head fell to rest on Bart’s shoulder. Jaime’s hands ghosted up Bart’s back.

“I’m sorry,” Jaime said to Bart’s throat. “Green did—something. I should’ve known, should’ve—tried harder to fight—”

“No,” said Bart, “no—hermano, no, are you porting me? You crashed the mode—”

Jaime shook his head even as Bart made to squirm out from under him, to kiss Jaime again on the mouth. He was shaking his head when he said, “I should’ve—”

Bart touched the slight curve of Jaime’s nape. The short, bristling hairs there had grown longer, softer.

“It’s easier to destroy than it is to create. Remember?”

“I remember,” said Jaime.

“And you got the scarab off-mode. You did that, right? You crashed it.”

“Khaji Da,” said Jaime. He lifted his head. “That’s the scarab’s—that’s his name.”

The strangeness of that stuck Bart. The scarab had a name. How could the scarab have a name? The vessel was bleeding out into the Atlantic Ocean, and Bart felt as if he had a question mark blinking over his head.

“His name?” asked Bart.

Jaime nodded. His nose brushed Bart’s cheek. “I asked. When we—we talked. A lot. Before.”

Jaime scrubbed at his face with a hand and pulled back from Bart. His other hand remained on Bart’s arm. Bart wanted to reach out for Jaime and reel him back in. He wanted to never let Jaime go again. How much had he already lost? Selfishly, he wanted to keep Jaime for himself.

“Wonder Girl’s in trouble,” said Jaime, voice muffled. “Black Beetle—”

“And we’re sinking,” Bart added.

Jaime dropped his hand. His eyes were tired. They were all tired these days.

“All right,” said Jaime. His jaw set. “We’re gonna have to work together on this.” He said it to more than just Bart.

Bart smiled. He reached out to frame Jaime’s face in his hands again. Quickly, very quickly, Bart pressed a kiss on Jaime’s mouth—and then he lingered, only a moment. Bart’s eyes closed. He was thinking of snow that tasted like ash, and of blue oceans, and of the warmth of Jaime’s lips against his. Jaime breathed out into Bart’s mouth. He sighed into Bart.

Bart leaned back.

“You’re the hero,” he said cheerfully.

Jaime touched his fingers to Bart’s cheek.

“You’re the one who came back for me,” said Jaime shyly.

“Well,” said Bart, “you and the Chicken Whizees.”

Jaime smiled, too. The bruises under his eyes bunched.

Then he said, “Wonder Girl.”

“Hold on,” said Bart, and he caught Jaime up in his arms, Jaime who was Blue Beetle, Jaime who’d crashed the mode, Jaime and the scarab too. Bart was fast—not strong—but he thought he could run a little ways at least; he had no intention of leaving Jaime behind, and Wonder Girl was waiting for them.

And then, holding Blue Beetle in his arms and to his chest where his own heart beat and beat and beat, Bart ran on. Well, they did have a future to save.


End file.
